The use of mobile devices such as cellular telephones and other devices with cellular data connectivity is proliferating. Almost everyone has some sort of mobile, data-enabled device, and many people have multiple devices. Users can access different networks using a single mobile device, and can access voice, text, and multimedia data from various network-accessible and Internet-accessible entities. Furthermore, mobile device complexity is increasing, with more and more advanced and power-efficient processors, display interfaces, and applications that provide greatly improved user experiences.
In many cases, a single user may have multiple devices configured to receive a particular type of communication. For example, a user may have a telephone number that is associated with several devices. When receiving a telephone call, each of the devices may ring, and the user may pick up the telephone call on any of the devices. Similarly, a user may have a messaging application installed on multiple devices and may receive messages on all the devices.
Rich Communication Services (RCS) are services designed to provide enhanced communications between mobile devices, including mobile devices that are supported by different operators. Among other things, RCS provides for enhanced messaging, which may include chat, file sharing, location sharing, and so forth, and which may be used for communications with multiple devices of a single user.
In some cases, RCS allows a user's device to determine the capabilities of other users' devices, and various types of communications are initiated by an originating device only when those types of communications are supported by a receiving device. In some cases, however, a receiving user may have more than one device associated with a single telephone number. When this is the case, it may also happen that some of the receiving user's devices support RCS while others do not. This may at times cause problems, because while an originating device may initiate an RCS session based on the capabilities of a receiving user's primary device or another RCS-compatible device, the receiving user may wish instead or also to receive the communication on a different device that does not support RCS.